(Reader alert: despite my best efforts I may not have succeeded in disguising certain spoiler alerts)
“I feel like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life,” says Julie the heroine of the Norwegian-language sensation, The Worst Person in the World, and it struck me later this may be more literally true than is at first apparent, truer than she means. A movie about a contemporary 20-something turned 30-year-old woman—beautiful and bright and privileged—as she roves about between romances, parties and careers might strike you as feather light (and would have struck me as leadenly boring if you’d described it to me that way). But in telling the story of an extraordinarily fortunate contemporary young woman, this movie manages to be visually compelling (there is always a lot to look at) and emotionally provocative. Given some time I think The Worst Person in the World may be about the weightiest movie I have seen in a long time. It is never boring.
Julie’s story is told in 12 chapters, a prologue and an
epilogue. Prologue is medical school where she has a promising start but
decides mid-stream that she wants to pursue psychology. That doesn’t last long
at all, and the next thing is photography. She’s working in a bookstore when
her career aspirations seem to take a backseat to her love life. She meets
40-year old Aksel, a graphic novel artist of some renown, at a party and goes
home with him, where he sagely tells her that they should stop before it gets
started because, owing to their difference in age, it isn’t going to last. Leaving
his flat, she decides then and there that she is in love with him, turns back
and tumbles into his bed. During this incarnation of herself she writes an essay, "Oral Sex in the Era of Me-Too" that goes viral. Aksel will turn out to be right, it won’t
last (he is nevertheless stunned and heartbroken when she breaks it to him). In
a chapter entitled “Cheating,” Julie wanders out of a book party for Aksel and
into another party, uninvited, where she meets Eivind, also living with someone
else. They get drunk and have an eccentric erotic encounter that actually involves
no cheating. But it spells the end of Aksel and Julie. She moves in with
Eivind, whose ex has schooled him in all the ways to feel guilty about first
world privilege. (“People die of thirst in Chile because avocados require so
much water.”) Julie and Eivind as a couple will, we learn, also have an
expiration date.
But while Julie and Aksel
are over as an item, the film isn’t done with Aksel whose wrenching post-Julie saga
becomes the pivot-point of a story that turns terminally serious at approximately
the point when Julie ceases to be a 20-something. The weight of Aksel’s
story and his suffering is such that Aksel unavoidably becomes the main
character, and Julie the supporting role.
Not at all incidentally, alongside Aksel’s story is a motif that reveals itself over and over throughout the film. Children. Aksel wanted them, Julie didn’t. They attend a summer overnight party where a guest’s young child throws a tantrum and at night they overhear the parents having a vicious argument about the stresses of child rearing. At that party she crashes where she meets Eivind, she mischievously spoofs a cluster of mothers by pretending to be a pediatrician and claiming that "the latest research" shows hugging and cuddling your children will traumatize them. Eivind and Julie both forswear children, but later, after their demise as a couple, Julie is pleased to spot him from the window of her apartment on the street, married and blissfully pushing a stroller.
This meditation on progeny, on regeneration, is reinforced by what I regard as the film's most inspired moment: During a birthday celebration for Julie at her mother's home (where the essay on oral sex is awkwardly received) the camera veers to photographs of family ancestors arranged in frames on a piano. The tepid ambiance of a 21st century birthday party is suspended and the narrative suddenly shifts to tell the stories of five or six women, long since passed on, who were not nearly so lucky. This one died prematurely, that one went blind. None of them had the choices that all of us--women and men--take for granted today, but lived the lives that were granted them, a solemn and bracing reminder of the preeminence of fortune and circumstance, and of the simple, inarguable truth that we owe our lives (whatever they are like) to those who bore us.
Julie is far from the worst person in the world, but the title is meant to tease out the judgement, the disapproval of the way Julie lives her life and the choices she does and doesn't make that some of us who see this sly, inventive, intelligent, frequently funny and finally searing film may be unable to avoid. “I never follow through on anything,” she tearfully confesses to Aksel, long after they are history as a couple.
Well, she’s right, she doesn’t and those of us who like to think we follow through on things might wish she would grow up. More than that, she is luckier than she deserves to be. A pivotal point in the story arrives when Julie is confronted with a life-altering choice; many a viewer will feel certain they know the choice she would probably make if she had her own way. But then, just like that, out of the blue, the choice is made for her, and she is relieved of the dilemma or even the difficulty of making a decision. Lucky, lucky young lady.
But here is the thing....Julie is neither immature nor lacking in self-awareness. She has seen up close in Aksel what the stakes are in life, how contingent her own good fortune is--and she continues to be more or less pleased with herself and the world. This quality may madden some, but it is also part of what makes this story endearing: Julie is not ashamed to be happy.
At least one reviewer has fallen it seems for the bait and decided that even if Julie is not the worst person in the world, the story is the worst sort of celebration of conscienceless privilege. Talk about missing the point. A smarter “conservative” critical take might have focused on something other than Julie and her over-lucky life, something else entirely: the absence of any religious, spiritual or metaphysical response to the starkness of the story. Scandavian countries are said to be among the least religious in the world and in the entire course of the movie—in which we see any number of visual shots (becoming and not-so-becoming) of Oslo—I don’t believe there is so much as a parting or passing shot of a church or a cross or religious iconography of any kind. The tangible world is what there is.
Which only sharpens the knife edge that lay (very, very barely) hidden beneath this charming story of a charmed young lady. The Worst Person in
the World is finally a smart, sometimes funny, believable and ultimately solemn meditation
on a question of terminal importance—What will we do with our short-lived
freedom?— whose poignancy is underscored by a young woman who insists on
answering it her own way.
